The Palm Desert Historical Museum was once a firehouse, built on land donated by Cliff Henderson in 1951. Before that, the nearest fire station to Palm Desert was Palm Springs or Indio. The firehouse had an apparatus bay for the equipment and another room which housed a small office and kitchen, bath and sleeping quarters for the volunteer firefighters. Later a small three-bedroom-one bath house for the fire chief and his family were added to the building on the east side. In the late 1980’s the city built a more modern, larger firehouse a few blocks away and granted the old firehouse building to the Historical Society.

The apparatus bay was dedicated in 2020 to Jim West and Karen Prinzmetal, and houses the larger exhibits that are rotated periodically. The fire chief’s living and dining room make up the majority of the rest of the exhibit space and houses photos and artifacts from the indigenous people and also tells the story of the post-WWII development of South Palm Desert and the Henderson clan.